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Entries in love (30)

Monday
Aug032020

Noodle Shop

Small car pulls up. Driver gets out, opens back door.

Sun heat.

His father hands him two crutches, stablizes left foot on ground, rises, awkward, balances with crutches under arms.

He wears cotton hospital pajamas. Short black hair. Crosses street. Right pant leg flaps in breeze.

He has no right foot.

Son leaves. Father buries his face in bowl of noodles. Eats fast. Hospital food lousy.

Finished with noodles he tears pieces of brown bread, drops into soup. Eats fast.

Son returns, they talk with noodle staff about his story. Helps father walk to car. Drives away.

Tuesday
May052020

Story

“That smells nice,” said the garbage collector to the sage burner.

“Let’s create a book,” said one, “and we’ll be in it. We can create a quest about love & survival. Like ART, adventure, risk and transformation.”

“Hey it’s a great possibility, with stories or vignettes for word salad dressing.”

“We need stories, water, shelter, food and love.”

“Stories existed before food and shelter. Stories describe hunting for food and social needs. All stories are about forms of hunger.”

“Love is a blind whore with a mental disease and no sense of humor,” said a shadow.

“Will it be a man-u-script or a woman-u-script?”

“Both. If it ain’t on the page it ain’t on the stage.”

“We are authors looking for characters,” said an Italian kid named Pirandello. “I am a plot looking for a character.”

“When someone dies survivors look for a plot,” said a gravedigger.

“It will have characters facing conflict on their quest,” said a young scriptor. “It will have satire, humor, curiosity and courage.”

“Yes,” said a writer. “It will be a labyrinth of desires and obstacles with rising and falling action and resolution as characters take risks, suffer greatly and overcome adversity to realize their authenticity. You will experience what characters sense and imagine through their actions. Socrates subordinated character to action. Get to the verb.”

“Let’s make it dramatic by focusing our spotlight on specifics and floodlight on the general to establish a P.O.V. I’ll play director. Places everyone. Lights. Camera. Action!”

“Our stories contain conscious and unconscious awareness like a maze or a puzzle palace. I need your help with dialogue and action as characters reveal their fears by living forty questions in the dark night of their soul. They trade their soul to the devil down at the crossroads at midnight so they can play the blues, create art and dance. Free from masks they are breathing, laughing and living healers.”

“Let’s act out their fears, dreams and joy.”

“Do your characters discuss moral ambiguities?”

“Yes. They speak with nouns and verbs with choices, actions and consequences. They slay adverbial dragons with an ultra fine red pen.”

“Is a place like this hospital a character?”

“Sure, a place has character? Writers explore environments like Tacoma, Vietnam, Morocco, Spain, caves…”

“It sounds like nature vs human or human vs human or human vs themselves. You become the thing you fight the most.”

“Do they playfully deconstruct the human condition with story-truth moving the narrative forward to get to the root of their experience?”

“The roots are below the surface,” said a young nun washing teacups on a Taoist mountain in Sichuan, China. “I meditate on the roots below the surface of appearances.”

ART

Thursday
Jan032019

Be Human

"Then we’d get to wondering about the billions of other minds at work just like ours, like the mind of a stockbroker in Tennessee and the mind of a toddler in Costa Rica and the mind of a mother in the Congo and the mind of a construction worker in Lebanon, and we’d imagine how all their thoughts are knit together in the same way ours are.

"And we’d think, “Isn’t this whole thing miraculous, the fact that we can share all this stuff and the only thing we’ve got to do is be human? Now this is one hell of an idea. This is something I can really get behind! What’s the point of hermiting yourself in your own brain if there’s a whole world out there full of love and fear and pity and compassion?” - David Foster Wallace

Sunday
Feb142016

Love is

Love is a blind whore
With a mental disease
And no sense of humor.

+

Slow.

Lesson? Sustain the art.

Siem Reap

1)    motorman sings his sad tale of "no money"

2)    the endless hard luck story

3)    rows of empty ugly hotel monstrosities line the Highway of Death

4)    being Sunday Someday, SR is more destitute than a hungry girl waiting to go to bed with a hungry man

5)    people salvage trash in the rain

6)    air is thick with moisturizer and masks

7)    Carl died. He left a young Cambodian wife and two boys, 12 & 6. Heart attack.

8)    I feel this deep loss. Profound sadness.

Needs. Drama. Story. Conflict.

Give it an edge.

Theme : loss, passion, alienation, boredom, loneliness.

One week ago he sat in a Lao garden. It rained.

Everything smelled deep, pure, beautiful.

Five months in Vientiane helping grades 6/7 be more human.

Sitting in the garden writing - polishing manuscripts about Turkey, China, Indonesia, affectionately called Amnesia.

For the last three months while playing with kinder garden kids from 8-3 he'd been involved with Ling who came from the war ravaged interior and worked the massage biz.

During the course of their pre-meditated hot sexual relationship interspersed with gestures and broken Lao-English guttural intentions, he bought her a phrase book and dictionary and English primers, and a hand-made paper notebook. He gave her colored pens and watercolor paints. She had the skill and artistic eye.

At night he read as she created in precise detail large Lao images of dancers, village life, coiled serpents, and vivid representational fantasy/reality cultural art.

He was astonished and supportive.

She was happy. They were in temporary attraction, lust, desire, passion. They shared lives. She relished the generous and serene outpouring of her emotion and creativity.

He told her he'd leave the school, town, country and her after a month.

They cried. They hugged. She painted a final picture of the holding hands, walking up the street lined with flowering lilac trees. Another had them hugging, shedding tears.

He suggested she keep her art alive. She said she would. He suggested she make a portfolio of her work and show it to galleries.

He flew away.

A vanishing point on life's canvas.

Ling's Art 

Wednesday
Feb102016

Trust

Hugs from Bon, all of 5, after his teacher said, T is leaving.
A small powerful hug from a dark haired smiling shy Lao boy.
Culmination.
A month of fun.
Dancing down 30 days playing, alphabets, songs, sharing, swimming, evolving, discovering inherent childhood joy.
Reading stories, drawing, hugs. Trust.

Lilacs purple green line the street dress
Silent theatrical gestures
Sent her home
Absorbing her tears, her art becomes alive
Stories, songbirds water the garden
Mindfulness in the moment
Ling sleeps off her sadness.

Letting go with emotional heart-mind awareness.
Blind eyes on a dark path at night.